Salt lick quartz

Salt lick quartz, a long translucent sip of mountain, I am
speechless in your crags. A mile away I
know the sea is roaring. The rain
attacks me even here.

Little hails of ice melt into your peaks and
shimmy down your slides. My mouth
tastes of oranges and strange white
powders. Too many teeth in
one crushed mouth.

The shine in you imagines some
petrified fairy, preserved in you like preformed amber,
pointed toes poised pointed wings flick'ring.
And who's to say impossible in a
once-world where metals melted and
crystals were unformed crystal?

Sometimes

Sometimes work will exist.

(Being in high school is hard work, thought the cactus.)

(It looked out the window at the street and saw the cars honking by. It concentrated very hard on its spines and tried to gain sensation in them. The cactus had a primitive but persistent belief that if it could gain more sensation in its spines it would be able to move around.)

(The cactus sneezed. Bug, thought the cactus.)

(I am sick from all the hard work I am doing to fit in in high school, thought the cactus. I wish I could just be in college already. I am sick because I am trying to maintain a set of difficult friends while still acheiving enough to get accepted into Johns Hopkins University.)

(The cactus had a dream, a goal. The dream, the goal was to go to Johns Hopkins University and study astrophysics with a minor in mechanical engineering. The cactus loved to gaze at the stars alone at night.)

(It watched the sun set. There were beautiful fragile tinted clouds in the sky. The cactus watched for stars emerging in the atmosphere. An ambulance honked by and the lights from the ambulance disrupted the pretty scene a little. The cactus felt disappointed in its community.)

Sometimes a community will exist.

in the dark

.twist the sssss
pine. .sus
pense. ?yeah? .i
think so.
.twissss
t.

.bug-eyes of abaddon lumi
nescent in half cloned dark.
.wiggle hairs.
.cloven a
scent.

.yer teeth sharp in the
back of yer mouth. ?yeah? .i
think so.
.ssnip.

(step)
((step))
(((step in the dark)))
((((in the dark))))

in the dark

!!pungent crack of
yellow marrow!!

Throw Down Yer Books And Run
Give Up Yer Guns

saul bellow

i am struggling through a novel by saul bellow

the novel is thick

it weaves abstraction through realism

the dialogue serves to further the plot

the main character is an asshole

an abstract asshole

the only thing i like about the novel is when adjectives are listed without commas

are all saul bellow novels like this

please tell me

thank you

The Eternal Stranger

Dawn-bringer, bearer-of-morning-light, his
Cytherean masculinity thirty million miles away
is echoed here
in the undercurrent of doubt,
in the questioning of love,
in what distances you from me...

And this poem could never get nowhere
because neither of us really believe
in that neverending quarrel between good and evil.

Dawn-bringer.
Maybe after all
both sides are bright.

In different light.